Guest Post: Patrick Penny, Research Trip 2024 – Wuyi
Dear reader, you find me writing this from the comforts of Wistaria Tea House in Taipei where I end my travels reflecting on this year’s research trip over a 2003 Tze Ping sheng puerh, enjoying a moments peace before flying back to the US and returning to daily life.
Wuyi was a vastly different experience to last year’s trips in Yixing and Chaozhou. While I wish to only share with you the ups, I cannot in good conscience spare you, my dear reader, from the many downs we faced on this year’s trip.
We arrived in Wuyi town on a wet evening, I took my first sock drenching step out of the taxi and into the neighborhood of Sangu (三姑) to check into the hotel we would call home for the next few nights. Wet shoes aside I was quite excited for the next few days of treading through cloud misted crags and gazing upon tea bushes grazed by the feet of flying immortals (feel free to mentally add any of the myriad other mystical exaggerations you’ve heard about Wuyishan).
Our first full day in Wuyi was actually magical, this was probably the best day of the trip. We spent our whole day with Mr. Z (redacted to protect the innocent), a local producer who is a relative newcomer to Wuyishan. Mr. Z moved to the Wuyishan area in 2017 and has been making tea there ever since. We trekked through Mr. Z’s production area and it became quickly apparent that Mr. Z is meticulous and driven by an intense scientific curiosity. His production area was among the cleanest and best kept I’d ever seen, and he approached tea production with a methodical system of record keeping where he tracked so many metrics that I’ve seen many other tea makers leave to “art” or “craft”, this was all in the pursuit of making better tea year over year.
Mr. Z believes that modern yancha processing yields teas that are under-oxidized and over roasted, and when you’ve had your fair share of bad yancha it is hard to argue with that claim. Many of the worst yancha do have flaws in water purging (showing green notes) or are roasted until the character of the tea is destroyed. Mr. Z lectured us on the historical precedence of a lower average roast for Wuyi Yancha and shared many well researched historical writings to bolster his claim. While I remain skeptical that yancha used to be exclusively one way or another in the past, I believe that Mr. Z’s results, his teas, are wonderful. As a tea lover nothing is better than having options, and Mr. Z’s teas allow one to explore the many cultivars grown in the Wuyi Zhengyan region with good processing at a slightly lighter roast level. We spent hours drinking through a variety of teas he sources from Lian Hua Feng (莲花峰) and Shi Zi Feng (狮子峰), areas he believes showcase the amazing terroir of Wuyi, without the downsides of high fertilizer use, yield boosting agricultural methods, or the price point of some of the very well-known Jian (涧) and Keng (坑) of Wuyishan. We started with a delicate baijiguan (白鸡冠), bursting with honey, grain, and floral notes, and worked our way through a dozen teas such as: meizhan (梅占), rougui (肉桂), lao cong shui xian (老丛水仙), beidou (北斗), queshe (雀舌), huang guan yin (黄观音), huang mei gui (黄玫瑰), qilan (奇兰), rui xiang (瑞香), foshou (佛手), and more. At the lower level of roast the unique character of each cultivar and sub-region of the park was able to shine through distinctly. This certainly drew parallels in my mind to the coffee world, where roasters like Sey and Prodigal (shout out!) roast well developed coffees with roasts just light enough to produce a robust cup without overshadowing the terroir and cultivars they work with. While I found some of the teas to be amazing, a few did fall shy of the level of roast I believe is required to transform the tea into something greater as is experienced in many of the absolute best yancha. But that’s what’s beautiful about Mr. Z’s teas, they allow you to experience a dimension of Yancha very infrequently seen – high quality base material that is well processed but at a low level of roast.
After drinking our fair share of tea and having a delicious lunch full of wuyi area specialties, we moved on to the crowning experience of the trip - walking through the park. Mr. Z drove us to a trail head and brought us to a few gardens off the beaten path first. He showed us where he sources his Meizhan and some Qizhong in Wu Long Gang (乌龙岗) and brought us to a 3-sided jian. This was the highlight for me, we were absolutely drenched in sweat from hiking in “feels like 100°f” weather, my feet were soaked from the many rivers and waterfalls we hiked through (which are normally not present, but it has been absolutely down-pouring in the area and many parts of Wuyi are completely flooded), and even in such a condition the beauty of Wuyi captured my spirit. The 3-sided jian lived up to the many verbose and poetic descriptions I had heard about Wuyi - water slowly dripped off the moss and rocks surrounding the tea bushes, the weather changed dramatically every few steps as microclimates took hold in all directions - it was truly magical.
After this we headed to Niu Lan Keng (牛栏坑) and Tian Xin temple (天心寺). We were greeted by Vistas that absolutely belonged in ancient brush paintings - it was something out of another world completely. But not all was well in Niu Lan Keng. In most areas of this keng we saw heavy signs of fertilizer use, lots of intensive agricultural techniques to boost yield, and very little sign of hand picking (most bushes we saw were leveled for machine harvest). While I’ve had many great teas from Niu Lan Keng in the past, I now truly appreciate the work those vendors needed to go through to find the truly special teas in this area. The tea here is so famous (with a price tag to match) that there is truly no incentive to make hand harvested minimal intervention teas here. I think many tea people in the west would find I’m being too harsh on the farmers and producers here, but fret not dear reader, many of these farmers drive luxury cars, live in dwellings that would be called “mini mansions” in America, and have the capital to allow their children a very different life if they should choose so. They are not struggling, and I am happy for them, but I will probably not seek out teas from this terroir in the future.
After parting with Mr. Z on a following day, we moved on to one of the all-time lows of our trip. We had tea with another contact… The tea we drank with this contact was particularly bad, enough so that none of us found redeeming qualities in the few teas we were served. This is fine – sometimes not all of a vendor’s tea can be a hit. But what followed was a maocha tasting by that vendor. We had all had a fair share of maocha (毛茶) tasting experience in Wudong (乌岽) last year, we were aware that maocha could be rough on the body, especially the stomach. This vendor’s maocha made us all feel extremely ill. We had even been spitting for the most part, consuming only the slightest bit of the maocha, but this was none-the-less enough to take us out of commission for the evening. Dazed and in pain we decided to call it a night on tea drinking. We had a meal and went over to the local craft beer bar we had frequented the last few nights and had a brew to settle our stomachs. After a short conversation with the bar owner, it turned out her family also produced tea. As scarred as we had been from the maocha only a few hours prior, we still decided to drink a qilan and rougui. Both teas were excellent and were in fact some of the best teas we had in Wuyi – We quickly exchanged wechat’s with the bar owner and made plans to contact her again should we return to Wuyi to visit her family’s production facility. We finished our last night in Wuyi with more beer and very questionable shao kao (shao kao tartar?).
Our last morning in Wuyi we decided to brave any kind of weather and make our way to see the Da Hong Pao (大红袍) mother bushes. Due to the rain we hadn’t had a chance to see many of the main attractions within the Wuyi Reserve and were determined to at least see this one legendary landmark. The park was technically closed again on this day due to the rain, floods, and landslides… so we couldn’t take a car into the park. We checked our handy maps and saw it was only about a 1 hour walk from our hotel to the trail head for the mother bushes – weather and park closures be damned, we headed out into the hot and wet morning. We practically jogged from our hotel across the bridge and into the outer rim of the park where after about 15 minutes we came to the first checkpoint where a guard would normally turn away cars. We decided to pull “big foreigner energy” and just walk right through…and it worked! The guard seemed completely unconcerned with a few laowai walking into the closed flooded park with all the dangers it may or may not have entailed. We walked about another 40 minutes, the rain abated and the path started to become increasingly beautiful, with rocky slopes covered in tea bushes filling up our line of sight in all directions. After about a full hour of walking we had finally reached the Da Hong Pao scenic vista trailhead – complete with Gatorade vending machine at the entrance. We grabbed a quick drink to rehydrate and confidently walked up to the entrance. The Gatorade was not the saltiest experience of this hike – there was an attendant standing in our way at the entrance. We once again approached with “big foreigner energy” and said “Hello!” in English. She quickly told us in Mandarin which we very well understood that the park was closed and we were not allowed in. We stuck to our guns thinking that the foreigner card may give us slightly more leeway and get us onto the trail. We pleaded with the help of google translate letting the attendant know ‘we walked an hour from our hotel to get here’, and ‘we traveled here from America to see the Da Hong Pao mother bushes’, and the Hollywood level drama of ‘I’ve been waiting my whole life to see these bushes and this may be my only chance’… she was unaffected by our pleas…and in fact maybe slightly elated as she waved away our google translated pleas and showed us to the exit. I would be lying if I said we weren’t devastated. In many other contexts I may have pushed it a little further – but I really appreciate having a Chinese visa and did not want to jeopardize it by busting through the gates and running to the mother bushes with just enough time to see and appreciate them before being arrested and deported. Slightly crushed like a yancha in a well packed Yixing, we walked down the hill and back to our hotel, the rain picking up along the way until it became a thunderous downpour right before reaching our hotel.
So what can I say? Our experience in Wuyi had it’s beautiful moments, the park was gorgeous during the brief moments we got to experience it between torrential floods and landslides. I drank lots of pretty good tea, and plenty of bad tea. I learned a variety of things – some information which I have varying levels of confidence in its accuracy, but interesting information, nonetheless. I left Wuyi with far less tea than expected, and far more athlete’s foot.
There are layers here in Wuyi that we’ve not yet uncovered. I’ll not say it’s my favorite place, and yet I also can’t claim that it’s not “a favorite” place – a place left to be discovered and understood. We’re just scratching the surface here in Wuyi.